Text Convo with Milly

Milly’s been able to text for quite some time. I set her up with an Apple ID on the iPad she uses here (don’t worry, I have control over the contacts) so she can send texts and FaceTime with people. She seems to mostly text me, Amanda, and her cousin Addy.

Yesterday she texted herself from her mom’s phone then she texted me for a bit.

[EDIT: I just noticed that all the emojis were replaced with question marks. Maybe I can fix that later.]

Zach: I love you and I’ll see you in a couple days. Have a fun weekend with Mom.

Milly: K.
9 pretty unicorns
Tee hee

Zach: Tee hee!

Milly: Ha ha ha.
????????????

Zach: ????????????

Milly: 3 weird people
!

Zach: Ho ho ho!

Milly: No santa

Zach: Everybody’s weird. Some people just hide it more than others.

Milly: ????????????????????????

Zach: Oh, there he is.

Milly: Talk later? Not to be rude. Just I gotta go right now

Zach: It’s cool, Bug. Love you. Text me whenever you want.

Milly: ????????????????????????????????

Zach: (But not too early!)

Milly: Tee hee no promises
Just kidding

Zach: Lol. Love you.

Now, if you made it through all that, good for you. It’s not that there’s anything super particularly special about that whole textversation, but I enjoyed it. It was sweet, there was banter. Really, the main thing is that she usually doesn’t text anything close to a conversation with me. Normally it’s just silly, goofy stuff, which is fine (and there was a lot of that in there), but Milly doesn’t usually text me just to chat.

I guess I’m just saving it because I thought it was sweet that she texted me so much, even if she was bored and just not really doing anything. She’s eight now, so how much longer do I have where she’ll want to sit around and text her dad on a Friday evening?

And in case you want any specifics, here’s some backstory behind some of the things discussed.

Amanda had texted me to tell me she took Milly to get a haircut. Someone other than her usual stylist (Lorin) cut it and it was a lot shorter than normal, but Milly liked it and it looks cute. I know because I asked if she’d FaceTime me when they could and Milly FaceTimed me when they were in the car.

(I don’t have a haircut pic yet, but I’ll take some when I see her again on Sunday.)

Milly said it felt funny on the back of her neck where they used a trimmer. It made me think of the first time I accidentally got my hair cut really short. It was such a cool feeling.

The references to Horizon and machines are from watching me play Horizon Zero Dawn on the PlayStation 4. She likes watching me play it, and since there’s minimal human violence (at least with what I play in front of her, and what there is isn’t very graphic), I don’t mind when she requests to watch me play.

The last time I played was right before Amanda picked her up on Thursday and I was going through a Cauldron, a place in the game that, when you beat it, gives you the ability to override machines and get them to help you out. She likes it when we override machines and particularly likes the ones you can ride on.

JJ is Jason, Amanda’s boyfriend. She really seems to like him a lot, which I’m very happy about.

It was the first time I’d been on the treadmill in a while. I was watching the fifth season premiere of House of Cards. I usually do my exercises in the morning, but I got distracted by reading a bunch of news and opinions on the failure of the skinny repeal of Obamacare this morning, so I decided to do it this evening.

Tristen hasn’t been feeling great. We just sat around and watched some movies. I got HBO on Sling so I could watch Game of Thrones, but there’s also a Starz preview week, so a lot of movies are on. Last night we watched Cloak & Dagger, a movie I watched a bunch as a kid because it was always on HBO. Tonight it was The Blair Witch Project and National Lampoon’s European Vacation.

We started reading The Knife of Never Letting Go, part of the Chaos Walking trilogy, which is being made into a movie (starring Tom Holland, the new Spider-Man, and Daisy Ridley, from the new Star Wars movies). I got maybe a page or two in before I felt Tristen start to twitch, the main tell that I’ve lost her to Slumberland. I was going to get up to go play a little Horizon, but she woke up. I started to read to Tristen again, but I think she was out within a paragraph or two. I settled in to reading a bit more of The Stand but only got a few pages in myself before my eyes were starting to fail me.

The Stand is a book I started reading to Tristen a while back, but she started having strange dreams, so we abandoned that one and I kept reading it a bit on my own. Between reading whatever Tristen and I are reading at the time though, along with whichever Harry Potter book Milly happens to be on at the time (which is currently Order of the Phoenix), I haven’t had a lot of drive to read on my own.